The Long Forgotten History of Tolerance for Religions of All Kinds in the Middle East

Gerard Russell is a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre in London. He was a diplomat for 15 years, serving in the British Foreign Office and the United Nations, and speaks fluent Arabic and Dari. Russell is a member of the Order of the British Empire and lives in London.

The
Middle East is fertile ground for religions. Its deserts, mountains
and marshes have inspired mystics and prophets; its tribes have
provided followers and fighters who can form a new prophet’s
core following; and older, persecuted religions can find refuge in
its impassable topography. Also, although much of that region seems
today to be suffused with cruelty and violence beyond our imagining,
it has historically often been a place of intellectual freedom and
creativity - a place for the exchange of ideas, and for their
intermingling to create new and startling creeds. The survival there
of some of the world’s
smallest and most remarkable faith communities proves that.

From
the Mediterranean as far as the Zagros mountains that divide Iran
from Iraq, there are peoples who believe passionately in
reincarnation: one of these, the Druze of Lebanon, will sometimes
settle inheritance cases with the help of the dead man’s
supposedly re-embodied spirit. A belief, inherited from pre-Christian
religions, that the essence of God can be manifest in earthly form
means that the Alawites of Syria can regard the Greek philosophers,
and also the sun and moon, as worthy of religious reverence. In Iran,
the Zoroastrians have clung on to their country’s
ancient, pre-Islamic customs: as late as the 1950s they were waging
regular war on flies, as creatures of darkness, while they treated
dogs (which in the Avesta, are seen as allies of good) with great
respect and kindness, giving a dead house-dog an almost human
funeral. Underlying these customs are philosophies whose origins lie
millennia back in time.

Until
the eleventh century AD, the Middle East’s
Muslim rulers were disinclined to enforce their religion on their
subjects. In subsequent centuries, this changed; many non-Islamic
communities were brought close to extinction. But those minorities
have never been so threatened as they are today. Iraq’s
Christians have declined in number by over 50% in twenty years. The
Mandaeans, whose religion was actually founded in Iraq in probably
the third century AD, have almost all left their country and are
scattered across the world. Even Egypt’s
Coptic Christians, who form the region’s
largest surviving religious minority, have begun to leave their
country in accelerating numbers.

There
is nothing inevitable about this. Muslims are not intrinsically
intolerant. Right back in the 1860s the ruler of Egypt, named Ismail
and titled Khedive (a Turkish term meaning “viceroy”)
reproved an adviser for speaking in a derogatory way about a
Christian official in the government. The Khedive did not merely say
that the Christians deserved respect as (in the Koranic phrase) a
“people of the book.”
He was more radical. “All
are Egyptians alike,” he
declared.

Even
the concept of a country called Egypt was a fairly novel one at the
time: it was technically a province of a wider Islamic state, the
Ottoman Empire, ruled by the successors of the Prophet Mohammed. To
suggest that all its citizens, regardless of religion, were somehow
equal claimants to a shared identity was nothing short of
revolutionary. Ismail, and others liked him, were ushering in a
century of emancipation for the hitherto marginalized minorities of
the Middle East.

In
Ismail’s time, Egyptian
Christians - known as “Copts”,
and probably numbering somewhat over 10% of the population at that
time - served in senior government posts, and had places in the
country’s embryonic
Parliament. They were acquiring more than a representative share of
the country’s wealth.
Three Christians would serve as Prime Ministers in the following
half-century. Egypt was more progressive in its treatment of
minorities, at that time, than many European countries. Parts of
Germany did not grant civic equality to Jews until 1870. Britain did
not have any Roman Catholic in a senior government position until
1886, and still has had none as Prime Minister.

Ismail’s
Egypt was not unique. Iran, from 1906 onwards, had a Zoroastrian
member of its Parliament and its secularizing twentieth-century
monarchs included Zoroastrians in their governments. A similar change
eventually happened in other parts of the Middle East, and the
resulting age of minority enfranchisement lasted well into the
twentieth century.

But
then a different wind began to blow. Liberalism went out of fashion,
partly discredited by Arab defeat in 1948 at the hands of Israel.
Sterner interpretations of Islam were favored both by the West (as a
way to contain Communism) and by influential, oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
Islamist movements which wanted to unify all Muslims around the
world, and persuade them to define themselves by religion and not by
nationality, grew stronger; the Islamist vision offered non-Muslims
at best tolerance, not equality. The Islamist movements profited from
geopolitics: relations between Muslim countries and Christian
colonizers became increasingly confrontational.

Their
main focus, though, was often internal - fighting globalization,
banning alcohol and curbing sexual immorality - and their increasing
influence was partly due to economic changes which had enriched the
conservative rural working classes and caused them to migrate to the
cities. Religious leaders meantime presented themselves as less
corrupt and self-serving than their secular rivals. More recently,
anarchy has prompted people to seek whatever means by which they can
protect themselves. In societies where the blood feud and tribal
identity had never been far from the surface, an ugly sectarianism
has resulted.

Right
now, the nastiest of all violent Islamist movements, the so-called
“Islamic State”
or ISIS, has graduated from assassinating its Muslim
opponents, of which it did plenty before it hit the headlines in
August, to full-scale ethnic cleansing - or, more accurately,
religious cleansing - of the Yazidis of Sinjar. The Yazidis are yet
another of the Middle East’s
mystery cults. They pray toward the sun, and pay reverence to the
bronze images of the supernatural ruler of the physical universe,
whom they call the Peacock Angel. There was a time when their
forebears would have been treated with respect: in Baghdad a thousand
years ago there was a place called the “House
of Wisdom” where
intellectuals of whatever faith were welcomed, and contributed to
making Baghdad the world’s
greatest city. ISIS has provoked a reaction: Arab states joined the
U.S. campaign against the movement, and Muslim scholars have called
for protection of the Yazidis. For the most part, however, the
anarchy and militancy which have swept the region have made
Christians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans search for any possible means of
leaving their country for the safe haven of the West. It is the end
of millennia of history.